Intel News Archives

Sound Open Firmware 2.6 was released on Thursday for this Intel-started open-source software project for having a fully open audio DSP firmware stack and related development tooling. While initially limited to Intel hardware support, SOF has since grown and seen support from the likes of Mediatek, Realtek, NXP, and even recent AMD SoCs.

For months there have been rumors whether Intel would cancel Meteor Lake-S desktop processors and leave next-generation Core desktop CPUs solely to a Raptor Lake Refresh or rumors as well Meteor Lake-S would be just for lower-end Core i3 and Core i5 level processors. Whatever Intel ends up doing, their Linux engineers continue pushing Meteor Lake-S related code into the Linux kernel.

The in-development Linux 6.5 kernel is shifting to initializing the x86 floating-point unit (FPU) initialization later in the boot process as part of a broader effort for trying to clean-up the Linux kernel boot process at least on x86/x86_64 systems.

Ingo Molnar submitted today the scheduler updates destined for the Linux 6.5 kernel. Most noticeable with the CPU scheduler changes are enhancing SMP (Hyper Threading) load balancing for Intel Core CPUs of a hybrid design with a mix of P and E cores.

With the latest Mesa 23.2 code as of Friday there is now a rather significant performance optimization for Intel's graphics driver stack that really helps out Intel Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist along with upcoming Meteor Lake graphics. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, for example, was found to be 11% faster now with this single driver change and other Vulkan apps/games benefiting as well.

Earlier this year Intel software engineers published a blazing fast AVX-512 sorting library that was initially picked up by Numpy where it netted them 10~17x faster sorts. Today marks the release of x86-simd-sort 2.0 with even more AVX-512 features in place and additional sorting algorithms added.

Introduced with 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors are various new accelerators available on select SKUs or via the Intel On Demand offering. One of the initial challenges there though is the early accelerator software support limitations and many upstream open-source (or even just widespread) software not yet enabled to make use of these new accelerators. One of the improvements on that front has been Intel engineers working on an IAA crypto compression driver for the kernel so that the In-Memory Analytics Accelerator can be transparently accessible to kernel features making use of the crypto API.

Intel engineers had sent in Shadow Stack support for Linux 6.4 as this feature part of Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) but it hit a last-minute snag during the merge window with issues raised by Linus Torvalds. Now it looks like the cleaned-up Shadow Stack code will be re-submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.5 cycle.

The recent leaks and reports around Intel Core Ultra were true and today Intel unveiled what they call their biggest brand update in 15 years for their consumer CPU line. Beginning with the upcoming Intel Meteor Lake processors is this new client branding.

One of the interesting Intel i915 DRM kernel driver patch series being worked on recently is fdinfo memory statistics with the ability to report per-process/client memory statistics around vRAM use.

While Intel has been working on the Sapphire Rapids support for Linux going back years and to other key components like GCC and LLVM/Clang to provide for a good at-launch experience with 4th Gen Xeon Scalable processors, one bit that they hadn't squared away in advance of launch has been the new C0.x idle states. These new idle states between POLL and C1 allow for a mix of low latency and better power-savings than POLL.

In addition to the drm-intel-next pull earlier this week that brought more Meteor Lake graphics on Linux and VRR eDP support among other changes set for Linux 6.5, on Thursday a new batch of drm-intel-gt-next code was submitted to DRM-Next ahead of this next kernel cycle.

Intel engineers have been working on new cluster scheduling code for the Linux kernel to better help with process scheduling for their modern hybrid processors. An updated version of these patches have now been posted for attempting to help with the Linux performance of Alder Lake CPUs and newer.

Since June of last year shortly after Intel announced the Gaudi 2 AI accelerator they began posting the open-source driver patches for Gaudi 2 with the mainline Habana Labs driver. That support landed in Linux 6.0 and since then they've continued refining that support for this new processor support for deep learning training and inference workloads.

A recent Intel open-source project that went under my radar until now (and seemingly many others) is Intel One Mono, a new font catering to developers.

Intel today announced the Arc Pro A60 graphics card and the A60M as the mobile variant of this new faster class of Arc Pro Graphics.

Due to not having sent in any feature pull requests to DRM-Next in prior weeks due to a miscommunication, sent out today was a bit set of Intel "i915" kernel graphics driver changes targeting this next kernel cycle.

Codeplay Software, which was acquired by Intel last June, has an exciting announcement to make today in the form of the oneAPI Construction Kit. This open-source project aims to help ease bringing up SYCL on new processor/accelerator architectures, particularly around HPC and AI. The oneAPI Construction Kit also has a reference implementation for RISC-V.

It's almost a daily occurrence to find interesting Linux kernel patches (and to other open-source projects too!) by Intel's large cabal of open-source engineers. The latest crossing my radar is for allowing the Linux "intel_idle" driver to run inside virtual machine (VM) guests.

Intel has released a major update to its wonderful, open-source OpenVINO toolkit for optimizing and deploying AI inference. OpenVINO continues working out great for optimizing and running AI models on a variety of hardware and continues to introduce new features.

Intel this week is using Computex 2023 to make some disclosures around next-generation Meteor Lake processors for laptops. The most exciting aspect relayed in advance during our press briefing last week was that all Intel Meteor Lake processor SKUs will feature their new Vision/Versatile Processing Unit.

As a temporary workaround for helping recent versions of Cyberpunk 2077 to run on Linux under Valve's Steam Play with Intel Arc Graphics, Intel's open-source Mesa driver is temporarily no longer identifying as "Intel" graphics via its graphics vendor ID in order to workaround an issue.

One of the new features of Intel Xeon Scalable 4th Gen "Sapphire Rapids" server processors is support for Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) but for this generation is only being activated for CPUs going to select cloud providers. Intel TDX allows better isolating virtual machines from the VMM/hypervisor and other non-TD software on the platform. This limited roll-out of Intel TDX has worked out okay with the Linux support for this security feature still being in flux. Sent out today was the 14th spin of the 113 patches needed for getting KVM TDX support wired up within the Linux kernel.

A few days ago I wrote about a Linux kernel patch being prepared for fixing Intel hybrid CPU SMP/HT topology reporting due to the way the Linux kernel was currently counting the number of Hyper Threading siblings for each core. Fortunately, that fix which is apparently becomes more pressing for upcoming Meteor Lake processors, has now been picked up in time for today's Linux 6.4-rc4 release and is set for back-porting to stable kernel series.

Intel Linux kernel graphics driver developers are looking at making use of Netlink for exposing RAS (reliability, availability, serviceability) and telemetry features of kernel graphics drivers to user-space for their modern GPUs.

For those wondering how the performance of Intel Arc Graphics is relative to the newly-launched AMD Radeon RX 7600 and other recent graphics cards, here are a couple of benchmarks for the Arc Graphics using the new Linux 6.3 stable kernel paired with Mesa 23.2-dev for the latest open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.

Going back to 2020 has been work by Intel's open-source engineers on implementing Key Locker support for Linux. Intel Key Locker allows for encrypting/decrypting data with an AES key without having access to the raw/actual key. AES keys are converted into handles with Intel Key Locker that can then be used for carrying out encryption/decryption on that system until revoked or system state changes. Intel engineers on Wednesday posted their seventh iteration of the patches for supporting Key Locker on Linux.

Among Intel's dozens of terrific open-source components -- including the many components making up their oneAPI software suite -- is Open Image Denoise. Open Image Denoise for years has been a terrific, high-performance denoising library for ray-tracing use The software has long been CPU-based while being highly performant thanks to leveraging modern instruction set extensions. Today though Open Image Denoise 2.0 is released and brings GPU acceleration across Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA graphics processors.

The Intel IPU6 web camera tech found in Alder Lake laptops and newer has unfortunately no upstream Linux driver yet and has resulted in kernel developers avoiding these laptops where web camera support is needed. Intel maintains an out-of-tree IPU6 Linux driver while they have been making progress toward ultimately getting it upstreamed. To ease the situation for Fedora Linux users, an experimental IPU6 software stack has now been added to the RPM Fusion repository.

The bug I wrote about this weekend where Intel is now disabling PCID for Alder Lake and Raptor Lake under Linux until updated CPU microcode is issued for addressing an issue with the INVLPG instruction when Process Context Identifiers are enabled, has now been merged to Linux 6.4.

With Linux going to disable PCID support on Intel Alder Lake and Raptor Lake while waiting for mitigated microcode due to a CPU bug, I was curious if this disabling of Process Context Identiifiers would have any overall performance implications. So I ran some benchmarks this weekend.

Intel quietly released a new whitepaper and specification for their proposal on "X86-S" as a 64-bit only x86 architecture. If their plans workout, in the years ahead we could see a revised 64-bit only x86 architecture.

Intel's open-source Mesa Vulkan Video driver "ANV" has added support for H.265 (HEVC) video decoding.

The Intel Compute-Runtime 23.13.26032.30 update was released today as the newest monthly feature update to this open-source GPU compute stack used on Windows and Linux for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support. With this release comes various improvements and new features like FP64 emulation for Arctic Sound M.

A set of patches to the Intel Uncore Frequency (intel-uncore-freq) Linux driver are expected for the Linux 6.5 cycle that integrate support for the TPMI interface and prepare for upcoming processors with cluster-level power controls.

Well, this is a bit strange... Intel just published Friday afternoon CPU microcode updates for all supported processor families back to Coffee Lake "Gen 8" for undisclosed security updates.

Back in February was a patch series proposed retiring the Intel Itanium (IA-64) architecture support from the Linux kernel. That removal has yet to take place in Linux Git but it's still being talked about and user-space developers are also eager as it would mean being able to clear out Itanium user-space code too.

One of the fascinating elements of Intel's oneAPI software effort is how open they have been not to just supporting GPUs from multiple vendors or AMD CPUs too, but cross-CPU architecture support. Many Intel oneAPI components end up working on 64-bit ARM (AArch64) and even IBM POWER. The latest Intel software package seeing 64-bit ARM Linux support is their Embree ray-tracing kernels.

Since Linux 5.18 there has been Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) in the mainline kernel that was contributed by Intel as part of their Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET). For Linux 6.4 Intel engineers tried to get the Shadow Stack support mainlined as the other part of CET, but issues were uncovered at the last minute. Hopefully Shadow Stack support will be merged for the v6.5 cycle but beyond that host support, Intel engineers have also been working on CET virtualization for enabling these security features for use within virtual machines.

Going back to last August were Intel patches to help Intel hybrid CPU handling on Linux by avoiding unnecessary task migrations within SMT domains. Coming this summer those Intel patches are finally set to arrive with the Linux 6.5 kernel cycle.

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver within Mesa is now enabling graphics pipeline libraries (GPL) functionality by default but at the same time has demoted their Vulkan mesh shader functionality to being hidden behind an environment variable until some unexplained hangs can be sorted out.

Intel today published 38 new security advisories in their first Patch Tuesday roundabout since February. Among the new disclosures today are CVE-2023-28410 as an i915 Linux kernel graphics driver vulnerability that could lead to local privilege escalation.

While Intel's in-development Xe kernel graphics driver is focused on supporting Tigerlake/Gen12 graphics and newer integrated/discrete graphics with this modern open-source driver with many design improvements over the aging i915 kernel driver, there looks to be one feature that as currently positioned will be missing for DG2/Alchemist: HuC support for helping with media offloading.

With newer generations of Intel client processors having the GuC firmware binaries is now a hard requirement for accelerated graphics support. Like with AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, firmware binaries are a requirement beyond the open-source Linux driver code. This week Intel published their initial GuC firmware binaries for upcoming Meteor Lake processors.

Intel Shaodw Stack support was submitted for Linux 6.4 at the start of the merge window but now with this two-week merge window drawing to a close, it hasn't been pulled yet and Linus Torvalds raised technical issues with the proposed patches that now jeopardize its arrival this cycle.

Intel software engineers have released a new version of their Implicit SPMD Program Compiler (ISPC) as their C language variant with extensions for enhancing single-program, multiple-data programming for both CPUs and GPUs.

Intel's ANV open-source Vulkan driver has increased its instruction heap size to 2Gb in order to address a hang experienced with the game Overwatch while this is also likely to help other software/games moving forward.

While Intel Thunder Bay sparked rumors years ago as potentially being a mix of Intel x86 cores and Movidius VPU cores, although the Linux patches put it as ARM cores paired with the Movidius VPU, Thunder Bay is no more. As I wrote back in March, Intel Linux engineers have acknowledged Thunder Bay is cancelled and there are no end-customers/users so they are going ahead and removing the Linux support.

A new set of patches were posted today to enable cluster scheduling for x86 hybrid CPUs. In turn thos latest attempt at cluster scheduling for modern Core CPUs of Alder Lake and newer is yielding some small performance benefits over the current code.

You may recall last year how several prominent upstream kernel developers recommended avoiding Intel's latest laptops for Linux use that bear their IPU6 MIPI camera over the lack of upstream open-source support. It's taken some months but the initial IPU6 Linux kernel driver patches are out for review and will hopefully make it to the mainline Linux kernel in the months ahead.